


Death Wears McQueen

by HenryMercury



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Journalism, Dating, F/F, Fashion & Couture, Lingerie, Masturbation, Murder, Past Eve Polastri/Niko Polastri - Freeform, Pasta, Phone Sex, Secret Identity, Villanelle/OCs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:47:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 16,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24404530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: Reporting on Fashion Week isn't the investigative journalism Eve Polastri signed up for.That is, until a runway assassination and a one night stand throw her into the path of Oksana Astankova—the unbearably hot new Editor of Villanelle Magazine.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 83
Kudos: 472





	1. Do you like sex?

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings, thirsty queers and other discerning fans. Welcome! I love you. I am you.
> 
> This is the first fic I've posted as a WIP in a long time, so please be patient with me. In these isolated times it's felt like a good idea to write/publish in a more interactive way. (Unrelatedly, I find praise very motivating; tell me I'm pretty.)
> 
> Adding tags as I find out who and what exactly make their way onto the page.

**PARIS**

“What the hell is that guy wearing?” Eve whispers, squinting against the bright lights of the runway.

“It looks like a gimp mask,” answers Bill, thoughtfully. “High art has always been a bit obsessed with the pornographic if you ask me. Quite derivative, really. Real culture trickles up, not down.”

Eve turns to look at her mentor. All these years and he continues to surprise her. “You’re kidding, right? _You_ should be writing this report, not me.”

“I don’t think my take would be any closer to the puff piece Frank wants than yours,” he shrugs. “You know I’m just here for the holiday.”

Eve snorts. “At least you have something to _say_ about all this. I don’t even know what I’m looking at right now.”

“You’re looking at…” Bill frowns. “An Oktoberfest waitress wearing a toy pig’s head.”

As the next model strides towards them, Eve’s sort of disturbed by how accurate that description is. The alarming fabric helmet has huge cartoon eyes, round blushing cheeks and an ear hat.

“So masks are going to be the next big trend, huh? Can’t imagine that’ll go down well with Scotland Yard.”

“Now see, there’s your angle. Paris Fashion Week: styles you may be arrested for wearing in the street.”

“Five outfits you can bail yourself out with.”

“Oh that’s interesting,” Bill points at the model who’s coming onto the catwalk now. “A bit on the nose, but it’s inventive.”

The model (face also obscured by a mask made of matte leather and silver zips) wears a black blazer with glossy crème ruffles sprouting diagonally between the collar and padded shoulder. They curve along in wide frills, bursting upwards in a way that calls to mind a bouquet of calla lilies, or fungus growing from a tree trunk. The wide-legged trousers are cut from the same pale cloth as the fungus-flowers, and towering patent heels finish the look. It’s stylish enough—but what’s unusual is the patch of red blooming on the model’s thigh.

“I don’t understand the concept of this show,” she complains. “But they’ve nailed the location of this femoral artery wound thing. What I want to know is: is it built into the pants if you buy them, or just a gimmick for the show? Does it wash out aft…” Eve trails off as the model stumbles in her monstrous shoes, teetering towards the edge of the runway. Spots of red hit the smooth white flooring beneath her feet.

“She’s dripping everywhere,” Bill frowns. “Are you sure this is part of it?”

She look waxen, too—but that could just be the harsh lights, the dramatic makeup, the pre-show starvation.

The model stumbles again, this time landing badly on the edge of her heel and slipping in a mess of bony limbs to the floor. The whole room gasps. The front row screams. The blood’s spreading _fast_.

Bill answers himself: “Seems not.”

As much as she can, Eve keeps her face neutral. Serious. Concerned.

“Fashion Week just got interesting,” she whispers under the ruckus, and doesn’t smile about it until later.

*

“This may be the best gin and tonic I’ve ever had in my life,” declares Eve.

“Better than the last four?” Bill responds wryly. “I think you’ve an admirer, by the way.”

Eve follows his gaze across the small Parisian wine bar, bustling with people—many of whose outfits identify them as runway show-goers. Through the crowd there’s a woman sitting on a stool alone, looking right at them. She doesn’t look away when Eve catches her doing it—just keeps her gaze level, a smirk curling the edge of her mouth. She’s very beautiful. Anyone would think so. Young, blonde, and dressed in a pink collared blouse and full skirt with huge gold earrings hanging by sweeping cheekbones, the woman lifts a champagne flute to her full lips and drinks in long swallows.

Vaguely, Eve registers that Bill is leaving. He’s standing beside her with his hat and jacket back on, reminding her that he’s a tired old man with a screaming newborn back home—and also looking decidedly smug about something.

“What?” she says, knowing exactly what.

“Life is short, Eve—go on, buy her a drink.”

“I’m not—”

“—gay, yes, suit yourself. But can you imagine for tonight that you don’t need to _be_ anything at all? You only need to _do_ whatever it is you want to.”

“Wisdom from your secret slutty past?” she can’t help but grin.

“I really did learn a _lot_ during those years, just by being open to it.”

Eve drains the last of her gin as she watches him go, then turns her attention back to the blonde across the room. She finds the woman’s stool empty, and something inside her sinks in disappointment.

Eve may _not_ be gay, but she is alone in France while Niko’s back in London playing house with Gemma. _Hope you like missionary_ , Eve had said when they’d last seen each other—and now the joke is on her, because she hasn’t even been kissed since she and Niko split. She misses it as much as she misses him, possibly more.

“Hello,” someone says, right at Eve’s shoulder. She detects an Eastern European accent, the _L_ sound pressed flat against the roof of the speaker’s mouth.

Eve’s heart ticks noticeably faster as Blondie in the pink dress claims the seat Bill’s just vacated. All her vague disappointment turns to very specific anxiety as the situation becomes real.

“Hi,” she says, observing with a sort of dismayed wonder that everything she’d seen from afar looks even better up close. “Can I uh, buy you a drink?”

“Sure, thank you. What is your name?”

“Eve.”

“Do you know who I am, Eve?”

Offhandedly, the woman gestures to the bartender. He hurries over with a fresh champagne bottle and pops the cork. Eve hasn’t looked at the wine list, but she’s going to _kill_ Bill if this ends up costing her a day’s pay.

“Should I?”

Blondie takes a moment. “No,” she decides. “You can call me Villanelle.”

“Like the magazine?” Eve asks. It’s not a publication she reads—all fashion, glamour and nasty gossip—but it has the same owners as the newspaper she works for.

“Yes, like that.”

Blondie—Villanelle—regards Eve just as intently now as she did from across the room. Her stare is somehow cool and burning hot at the same time; lost, yet absolutely focused. It fish-eyes the rest of the room, drowns it out. Eve teeters on the edge and lets herself fall in too.

“Do you like sex?” Villanelle asks nonchalantly, as Eve takes her first sip of champagne.

Eve tries not to choke. “Of course I do.”

“Not everyone does,” Villanelle shrugs. “Want to go somewhere and fuck, Eve?”

Eve comes back to herself suddenly. Back to the sticky bar under her hands and the hard wood under her arse. The chatter, the sounds of glassware and china. It’s loud, and bright, and brightest of all are the hungry eyes of the woman in front of her.

After decades of simply rolling over next to her husband and asking, _Hey, wanna have sex?_ she’d never considered that going to bed with someone new could also be that simple.

“Yes,” she replies, only a bit terrified by how easy it is to say.

“Good.” Villanelle sculls her drink. “Are you going to finish that?” she then asks, looking at Eve’s.

“Um,” starts Eve—but before she knows it Villanelle is snatching up her champagne and downing it as quickly as she had her own. The way she drinks is completely inelegant, but she still makes it look like fine art.

Closing one hand around the neck of the half-full bottle and the other around Eve’s wrist, Villanelle ploughs through the crowd. The golden glow of the street lighting shimmers off her earrings, and picks up subtle highlights over her cheek and brow bones that Eve hadn’t noticed before.

Next door to the bar is some kind of boutique, darkened inside except for the window display. Villanelle crowds Eve up against the glass and kisses her. It’s overwhelming, the hard surface at her back and the soft heat of Villanelle pressed all along her front, one hand gripping Eve’s waist while the other carries the booze. It’s just as well Eve doesn’t have to hold her own weight, because her knees are going weak.

“I have a hotel room,” she says hurriedly. “It’s literally two minutes’ walk.”

Villanelle kisses her once more before stepping away, swigging champagne straight from the bottle and commanding: “Take me there.”

Eve does.


	2. Arteries don't puncture themselves

Eve awakes to the sound of insistent knocking. Housekeeping, probably.

“Go away,” she groans.

“I come bearing cappuccinos,” says Bill from the other side. “Although perhaps I should go and swap yours for a Bloody Mary?”

Eve allows herself another unhappy moan before dragging herself over to get the door. Her stomach rolls over at the wafting coffee smell, as if deciding between nausea and hunger. The hunger wins.

“You’re a saint,” she tells him—anything to get the hot cup of caffeine into her hands. “Although I’d literally kill for a croissant.”

Bill wanders in and sets down the cardboard coffee carrier on Eve’s bedside table. Dropping his now-free hands to his satchel, he produces a brown paper bag, gone translucent in places with grease.

“I’ll settle for figurative killing.”

“Whatever you want.”

Eve eats at the tiny table over by the window, because she needs a pinch of civilisation to offset the rest of her this morning.

“So,” Bill says, crossing his arms and leaning close. His gossip pose. “How was it?”

“How was what?”

“How was whatever gave you the enormous love bite on your neck,” he specifies.

Eve looks down at the flaky pastry she’s tearing apart and abruptly realises she’s too fucking hungover and sleep-deprived to play this particular game.

“It was… good. _Really_ good,” she admits.

It’s still coming back to her, but she can say that much with absolute certainty. She recalls flashes of bare skin in the low light. Cool hands on her thighs, delicate but strong. A hot, hot mouth, and coming more than she’d thought anyone could make her come anymore. Dirty whispers interrupted by champagne hiccups and incongruously raucous laughter.

“She left me her number.”

Bill does something suggestive with his eyebrows. “Oh? Are you going to call it?”

Eve had wondered as much very briefly before falling asleep around three o’clock. The encounter seemed too flattering, too simple, too good to be true. She’s worldly enough to understand that trying to dig deeper would only expose it as such.

“It was just a one-night thing. Besides, for all I know she lives in Russia.”

Bill’s brows hike in surprise.

“She had this accent,” Eve explains, adding helplessly: “it was… ugh, really sexy.”

“I’m proud of you,” says Bill, reaching out to pat her gently on the shoulder.

Eve stares incredulously. “I’ve worked with you for ten years and you’ve _never_ said that before.”

“Well, you’ve never got it on with a hot Russian woman in Paris before,” he chuckles. “Also, this might very well be the first time you’ve needed to hear it.”

*****

Eve pulls together something quick for the web page on the train back to London; the facts, and something pseudo-thoughtful about the fine line between beauty and horror, laid bare by Kasia Molkovska’s very public death on the runway.

Frank loves it. He always approves most of the pieces she least enjoys writing.

When she finally gets home, Eve doubles down on the _real_ story. Arteries don’t puncture themselves, after all.

The tall bookshelf in her home office holds a library of research in addition to what’s she’s collected on her laptop hard drive. Assassins, especially female ones, are Eve’s special subject. There’s just something so captivating about the idea of them—what makes them like any other woman, Eve included, and what makes them so entirely different. Commercial killing is male-dominated enough to make Eve’s pursuit of such women more hobby than career—but there’s no way in hell she’s going to pass up digging into a theatrical high-profile killing that could _also_ turn into a career-defining story.

_Femoral artery_ , she mutters. The talking helps her process, even if she has no one at home to talk _to_ anymore. Not that Niko enjoyed hearing about her extracurricular study; it was part of what drove them apart, she’s sure.

There’s a small knife on the desk—something she snatched from the kitchen to open letters with and never returned. Eve picks it up. Looks down at her own bare thigh, and places the sharp tip right over the vein in question.

Her search comes up with a few femoral deaths—accidents, stabbings, a gunshot wound that was either incredibly accurate or incredibly unlucky in its placement. Nothing that’s both recent and possessed of the same finesse and flair as the Fashion Week incident.

She can already hear Bill’s voice in her head: _Aren’t you jumping to conclusions, treating this like a murder, let alone an assassination?_ Imaginary Bill has a point—but Eve’s instincts and wild hunches are what drew her to investigative journalism in the first place, and this incident is frankly too _cool_ not to mean _something_.

She presses down lightly, the knife denting the skin without breaking it. It’s almost meditative, the way her awareness becomes fully focused on this hand, this leg. Breathing is even. Muscles are tensed to apply _just_ the right amount of pressure—

In an instant the tip is through, the tiny cut welling red as Eve watches intently. If it hurts, she’s too fascinated to notice.

*****

“She was walking—and bleeding—on the runway for at least thirty seconds before she collapsed,” says Eve, half-jogging along beside Bill. He’s a very driven pedestrian when it comes to his morning coffee breaks. “That speaks to a subtle nick of the artery—and the fact that she didn’t even seem to know it had happened is—”

“Is this where you suggest it was a contract kill?” asks Bill.

“Well, I was saving it for the end,” she replies, more annoyed than she ought to be about her own predictability. “But it’s just such a… a _clever_ way of doing it.”

“Could have been a freak accident for all we know,” he counters. “A pin or some wiry part of a costume stabbing into the model’s leg.”

“Initial witness statements haven’t indicated anything like that.”

Bill stops walking. Eve nearly trips trying to curb her momentum.

“I’d ask how the hell you know that, but _I_ don’t want to know,” he says, frowning. Eve hates it when he’s disappointed, although not enough to stop.

“Kenny—”

“I _just_ said not to tell me!”

“Okay, sorry. In that case you also won’t want to know how I found out that they’ve identified all the models and staff working that show, except for one.”

Bill starts walking again. His pace is brisk, but not quite as brisk as before. “No,” he says—and Eve suppresses a fist pump, because _she knows that tone_.

“You _are_ interested,” she crows.

“Of course I’m interested! I am an actual journalist, not some kind of… Frank.”

Eve orders a double shot when they make it to the café, and gets a victory muffin to go.

“Guess which outfit our mystery suspect was wearing,” she says, pulling off an edge of the muffin top and stuffing it into her mouth.

“It was one of the _models_?”

Eve grins as she delivers the kicker: “Pig barmaid.”

“So you _are_ shitting me.”

“Nope—if I was lying I’d make up something more easily believable. So… you want in?” she asks temptingly. “I need some help looking into Kasia—figuring out who might have wanted her dead.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” he says, sounding stubbornly aloof.

Eve knows she’ll have him where she wants him by afternoon tea.

Elena arrives with Kenny in tow. She goes straight for Eve’s muffin, breaking off a chunk.

“You two do know he doesn’t work here, right?” Bill asks Eve and Elena.

“Yeah, he’s just my ride,” replies Elena confidently.

Eve snickers. Elena joins in. Kenny wears that look he always gets when he’s feeling sexually objectified and doesn’t want people to think he enjoys it, which he does.

“Needed to use the loo,” he says awkwardly. “Hi Eve.”

“Hi.”

“You look good,” Elena observes, looking Eve up and down as if she hadn’t noticed her before. “Like _had-a-shag-in-Paris_ good. Finally on the rebound?”

Eve rolls her eyes. “I hate how perceptive you are.”

Elena squeals. “Oh my god, you’re telling me all about this later.”

Eve throws a pleading look at Bill.

He shakes his head, shamelessly amused by her plight, and divulges: “That glow is probably more to do with murder than sex.”

“But I’d rather hear about the sex,” says Elena.

“It was _very good_ , apparently,” Bill goes on, because he’s the worst.

“Er,” says Kenny, who is loyally disinterested in Eve’s sex life and her favourite person in the room right now. “I’d better get back to Bitter Pill.”

Elena gives him a quick, distracted kiss. “Yeah, see ya.”

Kenny’s halfway out the door before he turns around and backtracks. In a quiet voice, he adds: “Nearly forgot: I overheard Mum talking about a shuffle in the editorial staff across the different titles in the group.”

“What?”

“The owners are appointing new EICs for some of the papers and magazines. This,” he gestures to the office around them, “could be one of them.”

“Wait, you mean we might get rid of Frank?” Eve whispers excitedly.

Kenny just shrugs. “It sounds like a pretty big deal, whatever’s going on. Just wanted to give you all a heads-up.”

“Does this mean I can call him a dickswab?” Bill’s been waiting for an opportunity to do that for _years_.

Eve smiles, teeth out. “Not if I do it first.”


	3. You're not my real dad

**BARCELONA**

Villanelle sinks back onto the bed of her fabulous art nouveau apartment, letting her satin robe fall open. She rubs an almost absent-minded hand between her legs as she thinks about the last few days’ events. The successful kill, which still leads most news bulletins. The promotion she’s been fighting for. The woman named Eve, with the softly American accent.

Villanelle’s fingers come away slick when she drags them up between her labia. She sighs.

Eve had reminded her of Anna with her hair splayed out on the hotel sheets, but she’d sounded so different when she came. She’d shuddered so satisfyingly on Villanelle’s fingers, made deep uncontrolled sounds like the she was being caught off-guard over and over.

Villanelle lets out a harsh breath as she presses forcefully against her clit. She thinks of Eve’s low voice—the husk in it. Eve’s laughter. Eve’s tongue in her mouth. Eve’s tongue between her legs, inexpert but so pleasingly game.

“Fuck,” she groans. “ _Ah_.”

She likes to hear herself, and there’s no point biting back the vocalisations inside her own home. If anyone—most likely Konstantin or Dasha—decides to march in unannounced it will be their own fault.

Afterward, Villanelle rinses her hands and opens her MacBook. Soon, Victor will be _begging_ her to work with him again.

Photographs from his runway show more than do it justice, in that it doesn’t deserve much. The Kedrin Spring/Summer collection looks like it was designed by a teenager who has just visited a sex shop for the first time, and no amount of good lighting can fix that. _Boring_.

Perhaps there’s a game to be had there. _Kedrin Collection versus budget fetish gear: can you tell which is which?_

She searches up a few images she’d like to use and drops them into the document. Some intern—Sebastian, or whoever’s replaced him—will take care of the licensing and edit them together. A little eviscerating commentary, and she signs off.

_Sorry baby x_

_Villanelle_

She forwards the draft to Konstantin, who loves it so much he calls her almost immediately.

“You can’t print this, Oksana,” he tries to tell her.

Villanelle clicks her tongue. “You are not my boss anymore, remember? I can print whatever I want. That is why they promoted me—fresh, young talent.”

He scoffs. “They promoted you because you demanded it in exchange for doing your _real_ job. Don’t think they are actually going to let you be the boss.”

“You sound like a jealous old man,” she scowls, putting the phone on speaker while she swaps her light robe for a warmer one. The afternoon sun has moved off her bedroom window.

“You sound like a greedy child.”

“You are not my real dad.” Eyeroll. “I suppose I can edit out the part about Molkovska dying from the humiliation of walking in such a shitty show.”

“A good start. I would also remove the part about blood improving the garments.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes again, even harder; give the man an inch and he will take a mile. “That is a true and completely fair observation!”

“Maybe,” he answers. “But you are not going to print it. You have to be more subtle.”

“Subtle is boring. I picked this magazine because it is _not_ subtle. Readers will love my honesty.”

She hears him sigh.

“Don’t ruin this before you have even begun, Oksana,” he says, sounding tired.

“Cheer up—I won’t ruin anything. Villanelle Magazine is going to be sensational because I _am_ Villanelle now, and _I_ am sensational.”

“They will not let you do anything that exposes th—”

Villanelle cuts him off, singing out “Bye!” and hanging up.

Konstantin is so very tedious these days—always telling her to be careful, be subtle. _Hold back_. As if restraint has ever been the cause of Villanelle’s success.

*****

After four days, Villanelle starts to wonder why Eve hasn’t texted. Villanelle is as stupendous in bed as she is everywhere else, young and more than beautiful enough to cut through a grown woman’s sexual identity crisis. When she leaves her number with someone, they can’t wait to call.

She’s having a frustrated wank in the bath when Konstantin arrives, yelling out her name and slamming the front door behind him.

“Go away,” she shouts, the sound reverberating off the tiles and glass along with the persistent high buzz of her vibrator. “I am trying to have an orgasm here, and you are completely ruining the mood!”

“Hurry up!” he answers. “I have more work for you.”

“The longer you keep talking, the longer it is going to take!”

Villanelle may have an above-average exhibitionist streak, but it does not extend to taking any pleasure in old men waiting outside her bathroom door. She settles for a cursory climax—enough to squeeze her muscles, but nowhere close to making her head spin.

She dries off and walks out in her towel. It’s a nice towel; bright citrusy chartreuse and lushly fluffy.

“What is it this time?” she asks Konstantin, who is leaning awkwardly against one of the columns in the living room, staring out Villanelle’s amazing front windows.

“You’ll like it,” he assures her, although he manages to look disappointed about it. “Target has asthma.”

She beams, mood immediately improving. “You know I like the breathy ones. Is it someone in fashion, or one of their boring political people?”

Konstantin cracks a smile too. “Both,” he replies. “She’s a big political donor who makes perfume.”

“Perfume?”

“Perfume.”

Villanelle loves perfume.

“You go back to Paris tomorrow,” Konstantin says, passing her an envelope.

Villanelle loves Paris.

*****

**PARIS**

Carla de Mann doesn’t know who Villanelle is. She would have learned, Villanelle reasons, when they announce her promotion officially. As it is she learns early, in the women’s bathroom of her own favourite party’s fundraiser.

The job is easy and satisfying. Villanelle slips inside the venue through the back, well-disguised as one of the catering staff. There isn’t even any security.

De Mann watches Villanelle stand there at an arm’s length, unreaching, while Villanelle watches her clutch at her own throat as the airway closes. It’s especially satisfying, the panic in someone’s eyes when their own lungs are betraying them. For a moment she forgets about Eve, about Anna, about everything except the way Carla’s body closes over her soul.

That night she goes to the same bar she’d visited after Fashion Week, picks up a lovely dark-skinned French woman with long auburn curls and fucks her into the bathroom wall, then again into the mattress of a bed in the same nearby hotel Eve had taken her back to.

“If I gave you my number, Apolline,” she asks the woman while tying the laces on her boots, “would you call me?”

“ _Oui_.”

“Exactly,” Villanelle says, holding Apolline’s flushed cheeks and extracting a last, lazy kiss before she turns and leaves.


	4. Around the world in eighty extrajudicial killings

**LONDON**

“Fuck me, that’s really Carolyn Martens,” Elena says far too loudly as Frank enters the office with a tall, grim-looking woman in tow. “God, I’d nail a cousin to work with her—she’s the one who made me want to be a journalist in the first place. Her Cold War stuff… I mean, she’s _literally_ saved the world.”

“You want to save the world?” Eve asks. “Wait—she’s Kenny’s mother! Have you not, like, _met_ her before?”

Elena looks at her like she’s a bit mental. “No? It’s not like she’s there while we’re doing it. Anyway, yeah to saving the world,” she says. “I mean, obviously. I didn’t grow up dreaming of writing clickbait about which celebrities are the most notorious outfit-repeaters.”

“That piece may have saved countless lives,” Bill interjects with faux solemnity. “It’s impossible to know for sure.”

“Everyone,” Frank shouts to the room at large. “If you’d please gather round, I’ve some news.”

“Ooh,” Eve rubs her hands together. “Is this going to be it?”

“We should be so lucky,” Bill whispers as the room falls grudgingly silent.

“Before I start, I just want to remind you all that change may be challenging, but it’s really an opportunity.”

Elena shoots Eve a surreptitious thumbs-up. Across the rest of the room, people shift uncomfortably in their places, probably expecting they’re up for job cuts once again.

Carolyn steps diagonally, so that she’s standing in front of Frank. “Do you mind if I…?” she says. It’s less a question, more an announcement of her intention to speak.”

“Go ahead,” answers Frank, slumping and looking put out.

“Ha! Starting to think I love your boyfriend’s mum almost as much as you do,” Eve mutters to Elena.

“What was that?”

The room stops. People are looking in their direction.

“Uh, nothing,” Eve scrambles to answer. “Continue! Please.”

“Very well. I will be replacing Frank here as your Editor, effective immediately. He has taken up a role with one of our regional papers out in Bletcham. I trust you are all professionals who will take this reshuffle in stride.

“Today, I’d like to speak to each of you about what you’re currently working on. I recently read a copy of this publication and I feel it has perhaps exhausted all of Britain’s human interest stories.”

Eve fist-pumps. Beside her, Bill offers a low high-five.

“That’s it—I’m leaving Kenny for his mum,” Elena declares. “This is the best day ever.”

“For all we know she could be terrible to work for,” warns Bill. “But she won’t be Frank, and that will be something.”

*****

“Elena Felton. You’re the one who’s dating Kenny, aren’t you?” Carolyn asks.

“Yes ma’am,” Elena replies, hands clasped in her lap, knees together like she’s a schoolgirl in the principal’s office.

“Very good. I rather enjoyed one of your stories—what was it called?— _Around the world in eighty extrajudicial killings_. Quite a romp. I’d like you to focus on political conflicts for now, God knows there are enough of them to keep you busy.”

Elena’s smile is too wide for her face. She’s glowing so hard Eve thinks she might be radioactive.

“Bill,” Carolyn says next, giving Bill a nod. “Keep up the good work. I brought you three in here together because you seem to be interested in investigating real news stories. As your Editor I will not only be permitting you to do so, but requiring it. This is a newspaper, not a magazine. I hope you’re ready to live and breathe current affairs.”

“Absolutely,” says Eve.

“Ah yes,” Carolyn turns to her. “Eve Polastri. What are you working on right now?”

“Well, I uh, just finished a piece on Paris Fashion Week and—”

“I’m aware, although I asked about work and I don’t imagine that little confection involved a great deal of it,” Carolyn interrupts.

“I think Kasia Molkovska’s death was a contract kill.”

Carolyn is quiet for a long moment. “Have you any evidence?” she asks at last. “Or just a penchant for conspiracy theories?”

Eve stutters. “Not—well, I have—it’s—”

Carolyn sighs. She looks disappointed, and it’s even worse than a disappointed Bill.

“Come back to me when and if you have something real,” she tells Eve. “Otherwise, I suggest you get yourself another idea.”

Standing as straight as she can, Eve nods deliberately. “Yes. I _will_ find something real.”

Carolyn eyes her in a way that’s totally mystifying. “I hope so,” she says vaguely, and then the conversation is over.

*****

_A penchant for conspiracy theories_ , Eve growls under her breath.

She’s heard it too many times before, especially from Niko. She used to play along, with him, so he’d think it was nothing more than a fun little hobby that made her happy. A bit of light murder-scrapbooking. It isn’t; it’s exhilarating, seeing links and patterns everywhere that most others find invisible. The breakthrough feeling of seeing the pieces together, understanding the picture at last. The sharp fixation of the chase, leaving the day-to-day out of focus.

She clicks the next link, watches the YouTube clip of Kasia modelling. Nothing ever seems to be much different, except that sometimes it’s bikinis and sometimes actual clothes. It’s 1:27am.

Eve clicks the next link. Five minutes and forty-seven seconds in, she pauses it. Rewinds. Stares at the face of the girl walking two models behind Kasia. Her eyes are catlike, heavy with that rushed-looking editorial makeup they all wear on the runway. She’s wearing a sort of jumpsuit, heavy boots, and a scarf tied in her messy blonde hair. She looks both younger and more gaunt than she had when Eve met her in Paris, but despite all of it she’s unmistakeable.

A lead. A fucking _lead_.

She’s listening to her phone’s dial tone before she really comprehends what she’s doing.

After the fourth ring, her call is answered: “What?”

Eve opens her mouth, emits no sounds, closes it again. “Hi,” she says weakly, and doesn’t dwell at all on the thrill that spikes through her at the sound of that familiar Russian accent. She feels wide awake all of a sudden… and remembers it’s fuck-off-o’clock in the morning in London and must be similarly late for Villanelle, unless she’s left Europe.

“Eve? Is that you?”

“Yes. Look, sorry for calling at this hour, I was just—”

“You were thinking of me.” She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds… satisfied.

“Yeah,” Eve agrees.

The next words are indistinct, filtering through the speaker as if from behind a closed door. It’s an exchange, she realises, when the receiver picks up a string of sleepy, Spanish-sounding syllables, uttered in a much lower voice.

“You took your time calling me, Eve,” Villanelle speaks clearly again. “I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”

“Of course I liked you,” Eve laughs, vaguely baffled. “I was only in Paris for one night, though.”

“So was I.”

There’s a sound, that follows—something beyond just breathing. It’s a gasp. The kind of gasp most people only make during sex. It’s followed by a breathy moan—an unquestionably obscene exclamation, unbridled and shameless. Background noise grows along with it. Rustling of sheets, possibly. The squeaking of a sprung mattress. Oh god, the slap of skin—

Eve is soaking through her underwear just from listening, and it’s pissing her off. “Are you fucking someone right now?” she asks incredulously.

“You’re the one who called at this hour,” Villanelle says, her voice all smoke and sex. Eve can’t stand it.

“You’re the one who _answered the phone!”_

The squeaking doesn’t let up.

“Oh relax, I don’t mind and neither does my friend here. You’re not jealous, are you?”

“No.” Of course Eve isn’t jealous.

“I think maybe you are. _Oh, like that._ I think maybe you wish it was _you_ inside me right now.”

Eve’s _harrumph_ turns out as more of a whine. Figuring she’s nothing to lose, she slips a hand under the waistband of her pyjama pants and ghosts them over her throbbing clit and the slick lips of her labia.

“Are you touching yourself, Eve?” Villanelle asks, although Eve swears she hasn’t made any noises to give herself away.

“No,” she lies, and appeases her empty cunt with a finger.

“You’re a terrible liar.”

Eve puts another finger in. She can no longer hold her breath enough to keep quiet—and fuck it, she’s alone in an empty house with no one to prove this is anything more than a strange sex dream. She takes the handset away from her ear, puts it on speaker and drops it on the desk in front of her.

“Maybe,” she admits, dropping her newly free hand to work her clit as she continues fingering herself with the other.

Villanelle chuckles. “Very good, Eve,” she says. “I want you to listen to my voice while you masturbate. I want you to come, thinking of me.”

Once she gives in, Eve finds it’s shockingly easy to comply.

It’s only in the morning that she realises she never even asked about Kasia.


	5. Scary lady

Villanelle doesn’t say no to vacations. She especially doesn’t say no to the ones Konstantin calls ‘business trips’, because this means she gets to put things on the company’s tab.

She is freshly showered and lounging in a white cloth robe with her hair twisted up in a towel, halfway through the hotel minibar’s assortment of tiny liquor bottles when he interrupts her.

“Why are you drinking?” he asks, glancing at his watch as if to say _It’s only just past eleven_.

“I am on holiday,” she replies, swigging an adorable baby whiskey. “I know! We should go somewhere with proper cocktails. You have spent time here—tell me where all the secret London bars are, where the spies and politicians and CEOs and journalists go to decide on what the official stories are going to be. In my new capacity, I need to know these things.”

Konstantin is pulling a sour face. “We are meeting the board in half an hour,” he says. “You need to be dressed.”

Villanelle holds out the whiskey. There is a mouthful left in the bottle, and Konstantin raises it in a sarcastic _santé_ before tipping it back.

“You looked like you needed it,” she says.

“Shut up and put some clothes on. Professional clothes.”

She studies him for a moment. “Which profession?”

He sits down on the room’s strangely tiny chair. His butt hangs over the edges, and his knees come up too high. A sharp laugh bursts out of her at the sight of him there, disgruntled like an old man who has been seated at the children’s table.

“You are Editor of a fashion magazine. Wear something fashionable.”

*****

Villanelle looks like James Bond, if Bond was both sexier and more fashionable.

She and this suit sculpt and caress each other perfectly—from the sharp silhouetting of her shoulders to the dramatic taper of her waist, to the remarkably comfortable pockets that let her feel the curves of her own hips and thighs as the fabric stretches just so.

If looks could kill, she always thinks, she would never get her hands dirty again. That would be a shame, because she does dirty just as well as beautiful. 

“Welcome to our offices,” says a tall, older woman with a stern nose. Her long white coat flaps in the British wind as she holds the door back, allowing Villanelle inside. “Oksana,” she acknowledges. Then, “Konstantin. Good to see you again.”

“Carolyn,” Konstantin greets her jovially, almost like he wants to hug her and pinch her cheeks. It’s very strange. “It has been too long, old friend.”

“I quite agree. Hello Paul,” Carolyn looks behind them to someone else. Her smile was cool, but when it drops away Villanelle sees the depth of the permafrost beneath. Carolyn’s face is unforgiving like the tundra. Her expression says nothing in the most deliberate of ways.

“Scary lady,” Villanelle whispers to Konstantin as they move inside. “Should have been born a Russian.”

He quirks a sad half-smile, and agrees.

“How do you know her?”

“We worked together a long time ago,” he says. “Now let’s find the free coffee; they put on good catering at these things.”

Villanelle doesn’t say no to free food.

The meeting is tedious.

Paul with the glasses is talking about _change_ , but he makes it sound like nothing will ever be different. Only the faces of the people in the seats—and even those will probably have most of the same features as their predecessors’.

Villanelle reads the man as gay, but the kind of gay who feels the need to compensate for his perceived liberalism with a whole bureaucracy of establishment values.

“This is so _boring_ ,” she whispers to Konstantin, just loudly enough to make him tense.

“This is your job,” he replies, more discreetly.

Villanelle stands. The curved wire legs of the chair scrape against the wooden floor.

“What are you doing?” he asks urgently, visibly resisting the urge to grab her wrist and pull her back down.

“I am going to hang myself in the bathroom,” she answers, turning tail and not making any attempt to soften the reverberating clack of her boots’ heels as she walks.

The toilets are gendered, and Villanelle toys briefly with the idea of striding into the men’s just to unsettle any conservative clowns inside. She has already been subjected to too many limp dicks in the executive meeting, though. No need to torture herself.

Villanelle likes common bathrooms. There is a contradiction in the way they are public and private at the same time. Strange interactions occur there. People might give tampons to strangers in need, exchange drunken compliments, or pretend not to notice each other’s existence at all after performing a duet of noisy pissing. Bathrooms become places for fucking, killing, changing clothes, crying, hiding, vomiting, disposing of evidence, drug-taking, washing, even sleeping if a person gets really desperate.

They are best of all for eavesdropping.

The ladies’ has three cubicles, of which Villanelle takes the furthest from the door. Locking the stall and putting the toilet lid down, she takes a seat.

She wins a round of the stupid card game she only downloaded onto her iPhone because Konstantin likes it, and she wants to beat him if he ever agrees to play against her.

She browses Tinder for an appetising dinner companion. She filters for women only; there are always men showing up in the list anyway, but this way they don’t swamp her.

She swipes left on a red-haired woman who poses with a strange-looking cat in her arms. Its fluffy face looks mashed and unhappy. Villanelle scrunches her nose in imitation.

She swipes left on a couple who won’t show their faces in their profile.

Right on a woman whose round, hooded eyes and oval face remind her of Eve. She enjoys the tiny flush of victory when they match.

Left on a big-breasted catfish dressed tastelessly in nude bodycon and red baseball cap.

Left on a man whose arm muscles bulge under a collection of religious-looking tattoos.

Left on a man who is only abs.

Left on a purple-haired girl who looks like a teenager and sticks her pierced tongue out in _every single picture_.

Left on another couple—an ugly old husband and ageing Karen wife who dresses like Dasha used to. Like Dasha probably still does.

Left on someone whose only image is a pixelated close-up of their pushed-together tits, bruised and squashy like overripe fruits.

Someone enters the bathroom. No—two people.

Silently, Villanelle pulls her legs up off the floor, pressing the soles of her shoes to the back of the cubicle door.

“—president of his mum’s fan club,” one of the new arrivals is saying, “so I said I’m probably more like the person in charge of catering than the president but that I was flattered he thought I could be president. He was a bit pissy after that.”

Someone snorts a laugh. A tap is switched on—but the running water doesn’t muffle the second speaker’s voice enough to leave Villanelle in any doubt: “I thought you said the sex was good,” responds Eve.

“It _was_ ; he’s just sort of… adorable? When he’s mad. Like a disgruntled teddy bear. Can I borrow some of that lip balm?”

Eve chuckles dryly. “Ahuh. What’s your therapist think about you gushing over your boyfriend’s mother as foreplay?”

“She doesn’t put overly much stock in Freud, if that’s what you’re getting at. Not that you get to judge at all, Mrs _seeing-a-shrink-would-be-a-waste-of-my-time_.”

“I nearly became a psychologist, Elena, I know what—”

“See,” Elena cuts Eve off. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You should give Louisa a call, honestly. Twenty quid says she’s not what you expect.”

“No way.”

The water stops and the hand-dryer starts. This, Villanelle can’t hear over. Massively annoying. She pockets her phone, drops her feet back to the tiles and gives the toilet a redundant flush before opening the door and striding out towards the basins.

The confusion on Eve’s face when she sees her is delicious. She has been tying her hair up, but quickly seems to forget the task.

The other woman, Elena (also very beautiful, with darker skin and an afro) gapes in recognition of a different kind.

“Sorry, but—” she begins, “you’re Oksana Astankova, aren’t you?”

Villanelle pastes on a polite smile. Let it never be said she does not love her fans. “That’s me,” she answers.

“Wow. It’s so cool to meet you! Congratulations, on, you know. The promotion.”

“Thank you,” Villanelle dips her head in acceptance.

“Promotion?” asks Eve. Her mouth is stuck in a little o shape, lips pink and pouty.

Elena nudges Eve with her elbow. “Ms Astankova here just became the youngest Editor of a Twelve Media title. She’s—”

“Villanelle,” says Eve slowly.

“Yeah,” Elena nods, “Villanelle Mag.”

“It’s okay; I didn’t know you worked for Twelve either, Eve,” Villanelle says smoothly.

“Wait,” Elena interrupts, looking wide-eyed between them. “You know each other? Eve, how can you know her and still somehow know nothing about her? Also you’re in so much trouble for not telling me this was a thing.”

“We _don’t_ know each other,” says Eve. She holds her chest up, posture stiff, like she’s cornered even though she’s the closest of them to the exit. “And it isn’t a thing.”

Villanelle makes a small show of clutching her heart. “Eve, I’m offended,” she says. “Was I not memorable? You will have to let me try again, then. You bought the drinks in Paris; tonight I will buy you dinner.”

No reply. Fine. Villanelle shoulders past Elena so she can use the sink right next to Eve. Although dumbstruck, Eve doesn’t step away when Villanelle’s body brushes hers.

Elena does dart aside to give Villanelle access to the hand dryer. Its loud blowing noise leaves behind a starker silence when it cuts out.

“Unless you have a recommendation, I will choose a restaurant. Text me if you think of somewhere good. And you should wear it down,” she adds, glancing at the forgotten hair tie in Eve’s hand.

Once the bathroom door closes behind her, Villanelle pauses. Sure enough, after a few moments of stunned silence a flurry of discussion erupts inside. A couple of seconds are loud enough to discern despite the barrier:

“YOU HAVE HER PHONE NUMBER!” Elena exclaims. “Eve, you _have_ to tell me all about whatever happened in Paris or I will literally torture it out of you—I wrote that article about waterboarding in the military, remember? And it didn’t sound too hard to do.”

Villanelle stomps back into the boring meeting with a renewed spring in her step.

Konstantin takes one look at her face and whispers nervously: “What did you do?”

“Shh,” Villanelle frowns at him, gesturing to the front of the room where Paul is now showing PowerPoint slides. “You are being disruptive.”


	6. Not most people's idea of exhibitionism

“I read up on you this afternoon,” says Eve, as soon as they’ve taken their seats.

It’s the kind of restaurant where the waiter puts your cloth serviette in your lap for you. Italian, but there are Champagnes on the wine list.

Eve is usually more of a takeaway curry sort of woman.

“Oh? I’m flattered,” replies Oksana. “What did you find out about me?”

Eve pauses as one of the staff pours sparkling water into their fine glass tumblers. He leans over her shoulder to do it, his large hand holding tipping the bottle from the bottom. Eve is reminded that the navy dress she’s wearing does not accommodate a bra. She doesn’t entirely know why she chose it for tonight. Nobody made her wear it and, for some reason, she doesn’t seem to need to impress Oksana with her fashion choices.

Perhaps she wants to, though.

Oksana stares at her as they wait, eyes tracing the lacy lines of her deep V-neck. She can probably see Eve’s nipples standing on end.

“You don’t even have an Instagram,” Eve bursts out once they’re alone at their table again.

Oksana’s straight face falls in like a dam bursting. She laughs. “Do _you_ have an Instagram?”

Eve frowns. She can’t be sure whether she’s being laughed at or with. “No,” she replies. “But it’s different—you’re like, a fashion icon! I’m a hard news reporter. Nobody wants to see my outfit of the day.”

“A _hard_ news reporter,” Oksana repeats back gruffly, twirling an imaginary moustache. She’s weird, Eve realises all over again. Unpredictable and beautiful and influential, and also fucking rude. “I read your Fashion Week story; do you really think that was any more serious than what I do?”

The waiter returns. “Have you made your selections, _Signoras_?” he asks them politely.

Eve is about to say _no_ when Oksana speaks: “ _Sì_ ,” she tells him. “Warm olives, and a vodka Martini to start. My companion will have the Negroni. Then two of the _fettuccine con ovoli, parmagiano e tartufo bianco_ and a bottle of _Dom Perignon_ to share.”

English and Korean are Eve’s languages, but she doesn’t need French or Italian to know Oksana’s order is impressive. She can see it in the waiter’s face, and the way his gracious nod goes deeper, becoming almost a bow as he collects Eve’s unused dinner menu.

“What on earth did you just order?” she whispers furiously as he departs.

“The best thing on the menu,” Oksana smiles, edging on a smirk. “Since I am buying. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“I could—I could have allergies!”

“Do you?”

“No. But I could.”

“Mmhm.”

Eve lets it slide for now. The Negroni is an excellent guess, at least.

“That Fashion Week piece was bullshit,” she returns to their earlier subject. “Thankfully yours isn’t the only title to get a new Editor this week.”

“Did your old Editor write the story for you?” Oksana asks, sipping water. A pillowy-looking nude-pink kiss remains on the rim of the glass.

“No, I wrote it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s all Frank would publish! One expensive defamation suit— _one_ —and he was spooked. Quickie think pieces ever after. Coward.”

Oksana regards her. “What will you write now that he’s gone? Now that you’re free?”

A stout cut crystal glass appears in front of Eve as she thinks about how to answer. The cocktail inside is stunningly red and, she knows already, profoundly alcoholic. A large cube of ice bobs and chinks against the sides, garnished by a perfect twist of orange peel.

Oksana’s Martini is a similar work of art—conical glass frosty, liquid of a dangerously distilled clarity, and two smooth, bright green Castelvetrano olives skewered by a slender stainless steel pick.

“Thank you,” says Eve to the waiter. To Oksana: “That was quick.”

Oksana stirs her drink—lazily, fidgetingly—and shrugs. “They know I can tip very well.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Eve tries her drink. It’s explosive, even for what it is. The Campari, fragrant as incense; the bitter aromatic flush of the gin against the dark herbal flavour of sweet Vermouth; the sweet tang of orange oils as she inhales.

After swallowing, she sighs appreciatively: “God that’s good.”

Oksana looks pleased. “What will you write about, Eve?” she repeats.

“Killing,” says Eve. Too bold, too honest. “I’m going to write about killing.”

“Now _that_ I will read.”

“Did you see the Kedrin show in Paris?”

“You mean did I see Molkovska die,” Oksana interprets. “No. I was there, but I didn’t see it happen.”

“Why not?” asks Eve. “You must have been looking away pretty hard to miss it.”

Oksana shrugs again. It’s a small, easy gesture—both innocent and flippant. “I was busy. I am a busy person. It was Fashion Week, and I was about to be named Editor of a fashion magazine. I don’t get to be a spectator; you’d be surprised how much business interferes with that.”

“Had you had any contact with Kasia before she was murdered?”

Eve only realises how close to one another she and Oksana have leant when Oksana pulls back. She lounges in her dining chair. Looks across the little square table at Eve with an uncanny focus.

“Is this an interview?” she asks. Her gaze is level, but her tone is almost amused. Somehow this only makes it more intimidating.

“Aren’t all dates?”

Oksana’s mouth quirks at the edges, but remains unsmiling. “Christ you are a journalist. Am I on the record, Eve?”

“You tell me.” Eve holds her stare for a long moment, but is first to look away. When she does, Oksana leans back in.

She comes towards Eve fast and all at once.

When she whispers, her voice drops in tenor as well as volume. “Would it turn you on, if I was? The thought of printing every word I’m saying to you right now? It’s not most people’s idea of exhibitionism, but I can probably get behind it. Remind me to give you a really, _really_ good soundbite later.” She snaps her pearly whites together, playful and alarming.

Eve takes a moment. Takes a forceful gulp of Negroni. “Is that a yes?” she asks, the alcohol still stinging in her throat.

“At your own risk,” Oksana gives a consenting dip of the chin. She smiles, finally.

Coming here tonight, Eve knew sex would be a possibility—but as Oksana’s lips pull back from her canines, it becomes inevitable.

“Just remember that, Eve.”

“I think I’ll manage, thanks.”

The pasta is perfect in that way only simple, high quality things can be. It’s salty, earthy and still light.

“What is _in_ this?” she asks Oksana, remembering only a flurry of Italian. “Besides fettucine, cheese and… some sort of mushroom?”

“You like it?”

“It’s… amazing.”

“They’re ovoli mushrooms. It also has white truffle—very expensive, and you can only get them a few months of the year. Did you know they use pigs to sniff them out?”

“Yes,” says Eve, because doesn’t everyone—strange and trivial though the fact may be?

“Fascinating, isn’t it?”

Eve nods, although she’s marvelling at something else: “How much can Editing a magazine possibly pay?”

“That is a very personal question! If you must know, Eve, I have my fingers in a few pies,” is the mysterious reply. “But I want to know about you, too. You are writing about Kasia Molkovska’s death—you think someone killed her?”

The Champagne goes down just as smoothly as each bite of pasta, and it’s easy for Eve to answer: “Yes. I think… I think that she was killed by someone who’d done it before. Someone smart, precise… and also dramatic. Bold. She wasn’t poisoned backstage, or shot in her hotel room. Whoever killed her—perhaps whoever ordered them to do it—wanted a show. Anyway, this is where you tell me I sound like a lunatic conspiracy theorist.”

Eve finds Oksana looking at her with rapt attention.

“I can tell you this if you want,” she says, “but actually I think you are onto something. You have very good instincts. You see tiny clues and you tell an amazing story out of them.”

Eve accepts these statements as compliments.

*****

Oksana stays in much swankier hotels than Eve does.

Oksana, whose mouth tastes of champagne and the cassata gelato she ordered for dessert. Whose neck bites with the wrong-flavour of perfume, not that this stops Eve from kissing it. Oksana whose breasts are just skin under Eve’s tongue—neutral but vital, the way water tastes. Who, between her legs, is all tantalising musk and salt.

Eve wipes the excess of them all from her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“You learn quickly,” Oksana says, breathy as she runs fingers through her own sweat-damp hair. She sounds proud, like Eve is her pussy-eating protégé.

“Thanks, I think,” she responds, rubbing herself absentmindedly through her underwear.

“Let me do you.”

“I told you I have m—”

“And I told you I don’t mind a little blood. Come on, we’ll do it in the shower if you like.”

Oksana hoists herself off the bed with an energy she didn’t seem to have a moment ago. She takes a few swaggering steps before turning and holding out a beckoning hand.

Looking the abject beauty of her—nude, satisfied, inviting—Eve can’t possibly be expected to refuse. Not when she’s already so turned on. She follows.

“Don’t even talk about eating me out.”

Oksana laughs. “Not usually what people beg for when I’m fucking them, but of course,” she grins, tugging Eve along until her bare feet skitter over cold tile and the sound of spray beats against the bathroom walls.

“How did they do it? How did they kill her?” Oksana asks as she folds herself forward and wraps her hair up in a towel. She sounds interested. Excited, even. Like she’s not just humouring Eve’s macabre fascinations. And really, why would she? She’s already made it into Eve’s pants tonight.

“There was a tiny puncture,” Eve says, picking up the hotel-issue toothbrush from the vanity and coming around Oksana’s side. She presses the handle end to the front of Oksana’s inner thigh. “Right here. Her femoral artery. Barely noticeable, and yet it drew enough blood to kill her.”

“Impressive,” Oksana breathes. She’s standing still, watching Eve in the mirror with wide eyes. Drinking her in.

“It _is_ impressive—thank you!” Eve agrees. “Although apparently we’re meant to say it’s awful.”

“It can be both, can’t it? And it’s so much more fun to find things interesting than just to find them bad.” Oksana’s hand covers Eve’s, pressing the plastic toothbrush harder against her leg before lifting it away. “I have a proposal for you.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry, it’s work-related.”

“Now I’m worried.”

“I just told you not to be!”

Eve rolls her eyes and wraps her towel around herself under the armpits. “Alright, what do you propose?”

Oksana licks her lips distractingly. Her hand darts out to untuck the end of Eve’s towel like they’re playing a game Oksana loses if she can’t see Eve’s tits.

Eve clamps her arms down against her sides, which only results in an assault of tickling. It’s knee-jerk fun, intimate in its silliness. Eve is laughing and trying to slap away Oksana’s invading hands when she finally explains: “I want you to write something for Villanelle.”


	7. Hello to you too

**BARCELONA**

Villanelle chooses a postcard of a Parisian street she collected on a past trip. It’s the kind of _rue_ that conjures images of bereted artists working at their easels.

She doesn’t write much on it, and switches her handwriting style like an accent. The brash elegance of her usual cursive is exchanged for a level string of unserifed lower-case letters, black biro-strokes slow, lines heavy and even:

**Eve—**

**Thinking of you today.**

**I’ve seen the Eiffel tower about 265397 times and it never changes,  
but the tucked-away streets of Paris reveal new secrets every time.**

**V x**

She moves to the vanity, where her perfume collection glints under a slice of afternoon sun. She skips over the _Caron Poivre_ she wore to Fashion Week, and the _Serge Lutens Cannibale_ she’d chosen for the London meeting. Behind them, still in its box, is her brand new bottle of _La Villanelle_.

She lifts it out and spritzes its first breath over the paper. An intangible touch.

After posting the card she flirts briefly with a twink in a white baker’s uniform, cap in hand, who is having a cigarette outside the nearby panadería. His name is Alvin.

“Kitchen is closed for the day,” he says. “But my boyfriend doesn’t like it when I smoke in his car, so I do it before I go.”

Alvin takes the pack from his apron pocket and offers her one of the two remaining inside. His blunt nails have remnants of silver polish on them.

She refuses his offer. “He is right, your boyfriend. It will make _everything_ stink. It even stains windows.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Tadeo would like you,” Alvin laughs. “Never even met and you are already ganging up on me.”

“I think I would like him too,” Villanelle muses. “Especially if he is half as handsome as you are.”

She lets her eyes roam exaggeratedly up and down his skinny frame. She likes her men like this—the confident androgyny is sexy, and there is less boring big-man machismo to pick through.

“Are you into women? Either of you?” she asks after a silence.

“I am, but—”

“What about being watched? Do you enjoy that, Alvin? Because I like to watch.”

Tadeo’s car has an air freshener in the shape of a pine tree dangling from the rear view mirror. Villanelle can still smell it, even after she’s arrived at Alvin and Tadeo’s apartment. The place is tiny but light inside, with blue and brown Mediterranean furnishings that are only slightly too battered to be that way deliberately.

“I can see that someone here likes their antiques,” she says, taking in the patterned armchair cushions, the intricate design on the threadbare carpet, the rustic lapis paint job on the sideboard. Alvin has gone to the kitchen, fetching some wine at her suggestion.

“That would be me,” says a tall man, exiting the kitchen along with Alvin.

“You must be Tadeo.”

“ _Sí. Mucho gusto_ …”

“Villanelle.”

“ _Bienvenido a nuestra casa_ , Villanelle. Any friend of Alvin’s.”

He sits down on a squashy white couch opposite Villanelle. It’s clearly not new, but is kept very clean. There is a particularly nice throw with gold thread through it folded over the arm. Alvin sits next to him, opening the bottle of _Rioja_.

“So, my boyfriend tells me you are a top,” Tadeo looks at her, assessing. “A domme, perhaps.”

Villanelle masks her mild surprise with theatrical shock. “I have said nothing of the sort.”

“You did not need to say it,” Alvin shrugs, pouring the red wine into three slim white wine glasses. “I am right, no?”

“You are not wrong,” Villanelle concedes. She can play any part, but with strangers she does like to be the dominant one.

“He is never wrong about such things. It is like his sixth sense.” Tadeo gives Alvin an affectionate pat on the thigh. “He and I like to play, from time to time, with someone who enjoys control. Giving orders. Some light impact play, maybe a touch of humiliation. We both prefer receiving these things to giving them, you see.”

“I see,” Villanelle nods seriously when Tadeo pauses, waiting for some sort of acknowledgement. “I do enjoy giving these things.”

“Told you,” Alvin grins, his knee knocking sideways against Tadeo’s.

“When do you want to start this, hm?” Villanelle accepts her glass of wine but does not drink any.

Tadeo smirks. “I will leave that up to you.”

*

**LONDON**

Eve feels like she’s in a spy movie—albeit a really weird, low-budget one. She opens her computer, pulling up the email she received a couple of days ago. It looks like the worst kind of spam.

_Big Tits Hot Russian Woman are DESPERATE to meet British Men!! Click Here to chat Now_

She hits the incredibly dodgy-looking link. It takes her to, unsurprisingly enough, an incredibly dodgy-looking signup page. Ignoring the photos around the screen (as heavily photoshopped as they are suggestive), Eve punches in the username and password she’s singled out from the contents of the postcard. Eiffel. 265397.

She tries not to be surprised when the credentials actually _work_.

Behind the login are two apparent CAPTCHA fields:

Something about the wafting text makes Eve want to laugh. It feels like she’s received a ransom note of letters cut from magazines; whoever V is, they certainly appreciate the drama of their occupation. They might also be messing with her, but Eve decides to reserve her judgement until she’s seen all there is to see here. V may turn out to be a troll—but Oksana is a real person. Whatever her reason is for putting Eve in touch with V, it’s bound to reveal something about the woman.

And god help her, Eve wants to know everything.

Eve types the words into the little boxes underneath, dutifully capitalising where necessary: _Kasia Molkovska Victor Kedrin._ She enters them, but the text refreshes empty and nothing else appears on the page. She tries the other one: _Carla de Mann poisoned_. Also no luck.

Maybe what she sees right now is the whole of the message. It’s not a lot, for all the postcards and passwords it’s taken to get here.

Amidst the imploring porn ads, a flash to the lower right of the screen catches her eye. It looks like a live chat, the minimised pop-up flickering with a bright red _(1)_. Eve expands the chat.

 **Hi** _,_ says the message.

Eve’s cursor blinks at her.

 **Hi** _,_ she types back. Her finger hovers over the enter key for a second, then falls.

**How can I help you, Eve?**

Eve freezes. A chill—or is it a thrill?—goes through her. Someone really is there; V, or someone working with V.

**You can tell me what these snippets are supposed to mean.**

**Come on now, you are a smart person. If you can’t figure it out, maybe this relationship is not going to work after all.**

**You asked how you could help** , she types, but backspaces rather than sending. She’s being tested—and just privately, she likes it. The challenge. The fact she’s been noticed, deemed worthy of a shot at it. The mystery and puzzle of it.

 _Carla de Mann poisoned._ Eve’s aware that de Mann died recently, but there have been no official findings released—only that police do not, _prima facie_ , suspect foul play. Cause of death appeared to be an asthma attack, and all sources say de Mann was severely asthmatic. The journalism around her passing has been entirely commemorative, and Eve has had little to do with it.

Eve rings Kenny.

“Can you get me the toxicology report on Carla de Mann?” she asks. “I think it may have been leaked and I want to verify something.”

“Hello to you too,” he replies. “I’ll have a look. Call you back.”

“Thanks, bye.”

 _Kasia Molkovska Victor Kedrin._ The second fake CAPTCHA gives her much less. Kasia Molkovska, the murdered model. Twenty-one; Polish; worked some fairly amateur lingerie shoots until Kedrin Collection hired her for New York Fashion Week five years ago. Since then she’s done Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Balmain and a swathe of other high fashion labels Eve only knows as expensive.

Victor Kedrin, the designer who gave Kasia her break, and to whom she remained very loyal throughout her career, until she died walking in one of his shows.

Had Kedrin killed Kasia? Had an argument, become jealous that she was working with other brands more often? Had he hired the imposter model to kill her publicly for the attention it would generate?

Eve is interrupted by Kenny’s return call.

“Anything interesting?” she asks.

“Hello to you too,” says Kenny. “No, and also yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there is no toxicology report. Not yet, anyway.”


	8. Are you calling me a bitch?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!! I'm sorry this update is late and small. Major administrative drama underway in the real life. (I'm perfectly fine, just real exhausted and unfocused.) I have also written some of another KE fic, which hopefully I can post someday, so there's that.

“Boring,” Villanelle rolls up her crêpe until it looks like a long, pale cigar, dripping in buttery sauce and _Grand Marnier_. She eats it messily, watching Konstantin’s pained expression. “What else is happening?” she asks.

He sips his coffee. Shrugs. “Some guys told TMZ you had a kinky threesome with them.”

“Oh good,” she says, licking sweetness from her fingers.

“Good?” Konstantin is incredulous.

“Yes. Now people will come to me for kinky threesomes. It should really streamline my calendar; you should be grateful.”

“This is not the type of news you are meant to be producing.”

Villanelle shrugs. “Not my fault if it is newsworthy how good I am in bed—but if you are _really_ upset about this then I will publish an article saying that rustic furniture is extremely unfashionable now. That will devastate them.”

Konstantin looks to the heavens, the way he always does when he’s deciding it isn’t worth trying to understand her argument. As always, she counts it as a win.

“Tomorrow I can tell you about your new assignment,” he says. “Then you can stop acting like a dog who hasn’t been walked.”

“Are you calling me a bitch, Konstantin?”

“Ha! That would be generous of me, you know.”

Villanelle makes a loud whining noise, then barks right in his face. A few passers-by are visibly startled. One of them is a woman in an ugly straw hat, walking a French bulldog. The dog starts to growl. Villanelle smiles beatifically at pet, owner and the increasingly ruddy Konstantin.

“In the meantime,” he tells her, standing up and brushing off the crumbs of the pastry he finished earlier, “you should try to actually publish this magazine you wanted so badly to be in charge of.”

Villanelle’s phone dings conveniently. “Ah, this is very important,” she says, wide-eyed, reaching out for the last bit of Konstantin’s galette and shoving it in her mouth before he can try to catch her wrist. “Later!”

She looks back surreptitiously as she rounds the corner of the strip. He hasn’t bothered following her. She has left him with the check, anyway.

Both passcode and thumbprint are required to open the encrypted messenger on her phone and read the message from Eve:

**Kedrin had Kasia killed. Am I warm?**

Villanelle smiles to herself. An old man gives her a dirty look as she walks towards him with her eyes on her phone. _It is called peripheral vision,_ she thinks to herself. He is not tall, hunched over his walking stick. Her elbow connects easily with his shaking arm on the way past. _Bête comme ses pieds._

She texts: **Ice cold. Sorry, baby**.

It is amusing, watching the three dots appear and disappear as Eve tries to formulate a response. Villanelle can almost hear that clever mind at work.

**Okay thanks,** is all that comes back. She takes this to mean Eve is off in pursuit of her next theory. In pursuit of Villanelle herself, although she doesn’t understand that yet.

Villanelle always enjoys the chase, but to chase and be chased at once is a different pleasure. It is like a sixty-nine of seduction. A game of cat and cat. She is not a writer; she has underlings to do that for her.

She hits four on speed dial. “Sebastian,” she addresses whoever has picked up the phone at the intern’s desk. “How would you like to assemble this month’s magazine?”

The new Sebastian is a girl. Villanelle asks her name but doesn’t listen to the answer. Girl Sebastian is quite unattractive. Villanelle isn’t sure how ugly people can work at fashion magazines, but obviously they can; Konstantin has been at it for years.

“No,” she says, dismissing a boring-looking ode to the _Louboutin_. The red bottoms are the golden arches of expensive shoes; everyone’s first thought. “Boring.”

“Sorry, yeah,” the intern squeaks, pulling out the next proposed spread to lay across Villanelle’s desk.

The desk is shitty office furniture, just like everyone else’s in the building. She should buy a new desk.

“Uh—this one: big, bright tulle dresses, with imagery from Molly Goddard’s collection and Rihanna’s red carpet looks—”

“Hm,” Villanelle says, pleasantly surprised. “Yes. I actually like this one! Next.”

The hint of praise makes Sebastian fumble with the folder in her arms. She decides she will stick with negative reinforcement in future.

“We’ve had, er, low engagement with the _Ask Villanelle_ section so Señor Vasiliev recommends we discontinue that, and replace it with—”

“Señor Vasiliev?” Villanelle interrupts. She cocks a brow and Sebastian shrinks as if vacuum-sealed. “Konstantin is not the Editor of this magazine. He does not get to cut away sections and replace them with whatever he likes. Tell me: who has been writing the shitty answers on behalf of my magazine?”

Sebastian looks like she needs a blanket and a cup of cocoa. Poor baby. Villanelle makes a game of unwavering eye contact, seeing how long she can go without blinking. The answer is longer than it takes Sebastian to stammer:

“A few of us—I don’t really know who writes which responses.”

“Bullshit,” Villanelle notes, “not that I really care. I will be writing the messages from Villanelle from now on. I am taking this magazine in a new direction. Send me the questions; if they are stupid, then make up some better ones. Do _not_ scrap any more of my magazine just because Konstantin tells you to.” She waves a hand, shooing the girl away. “Wait!” she adds, as Sebastian scuttles off—“I’m hungry. I will have coffee and… _Miguelitos_. Hurry up, I am dying here.”

Villanelle puts her feet up on the table in front of her, ankles crossed, and admires her shoes. They’re new season Alexander McQueen platform brogues, all black leather and statement stitching. She likes how she feels wearing them: comfortable, a little bit butch. She has the _range_.

Eve could have the range, too, Villanelle thinks. God, the things Villanelle would love to buy for her. Would love to watch her slide into. That would be…

Too much. It would be too much.

Villanelle satisfies her urge to shop looking at expensive antique desks instead.

She is distracted by maybe _one_ or _two_ form-fitting dresses in the dark greens, navies and blacks that Eve seems to prefer.


	9. Proper dominatrix material

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. Hello. It has been..... a time. Not to undermine the US election, Destiel, Putin, COVID and all that other shit, but this fic actually updating might be the craziest thing to happen all week.
> 
> Quick warning for reference to subject matter attributable to Victor Kedrin in TV canon.

**LONDON**

Victor Kedrin didn’t kill Kasia.

A deeper dive into the media presence of the designer and model over the last several years makes Eve feel like an idiot for missing it: Victor Kedrin didn’t _kill_ Kasia, he was _fucking_ her _._

And how long ago _that_ started doesn’t bear thinking about. Eve feels dirty just scrolling through the paparazzi shots of the pair.

They’re at the beach—and there’s Kasia, nearly spilling out of her bikini top amongst the white foam of a breaking wave. Kedrin, laughing as he places his white fedora on her head. Kasia, rubbing sunscreen into Kedrin’s back.

They’re outside at a café—and there’s Kedrin greeting Kasia with a peck on the cheek and a hand on her waist before they sit. Kasia, leaning against Kedrin’s shoulder as he lights her cigarette for her. Kedrin resting one large hand on Kasia’s forearm across the table as they converse.

“Heard your girlfriend’s been a bit naughty,” Elena interrupts, pulling Eve back into the reality of her work day.

“She’s what?” Eve asks, before remembering: “and I don’t have a girlfriend. Can you keep it down?”

Elena rolls her eyes, but does switch to her inside voice as she continues: “Yeah, I can see that from the way you have no idea who I was referring to.”

“She’s not.” Eve argues weakly. “Anyway, what’s your stalking revealed this time?”

Elena gives her the _I’m actually concerned for your health right now_ look. “If scrolling two articles deep on the TMZ feed can be considered stalking? Apparently she hooked up with a couple of Spanish guys and there was some pretty heavy BDSM stuff involved; whips and everything! Proper dominatrix material. You’ve been holding out on me.”

She vibrates with excitement as she says it, but stops mid-buzz at something she reads on Eve’s face.

“Oh shit, sorry,” her brow creases, and Gossipy Elena is replaced instantly with Concerned Elena. “I didn’t realise you were actually—”

“We’re really not,” Eve snaps, unsure of what’s come over her. “Oksana can have kinky sex with whoever she wants; it’s none of my business.”

“Only you _want_ it to be your business.”

“No,” Eve tries. It doesn’t feel right. “Yes.” That’s better. “It’s not how you’re thinking, though.”

“So you’re _not_ mad with jealousy?”

“I’m just…” Eve puts her head in her hands as it slots into place. “Do I give off some kind of vibe that says ‘have vanilla sex with me’?”

It’s something Niko had certainly taken to heart—but Eve is going to be extremely disappointed if it turns out she’s been sending some kind of boring-signal unbeknownst to herself.

Elena’s expression morphs into one of full-blown delight. “I need caffeine, and you’re coming with,” she says, and drags Eve out of her seat. “We are going to make you some kinky sex plans.”

Bill, the eavesdropper, stops on his way to his desk and follows them out as if summoned.

“Well,” says Bill, pulling the top off his blueberry muffin, “have _you_ ever initiated sex with any BDSM elements?”

Eve glares at him.

Bill nods. “There’s your problem, then.”

“Thanks, Doctor Pargrave.”

“Ooh,” Elena lights up with an idea Eve’s certain she’ll hate. “This _would_ be something you could work through in therapy. Louisa really—”

Eve swipes Elena’s chocolate croissant and takes an enormous bite out of it.

“Oi!” Elena snatches back the abused pastry, cradling it protectively.

“Not sorry,” Eve states for the record. “I did _try_ to spice things up with Niko, but he was… Niko. Actual missionaries wish they were as committed to the lifestyle as him.”

Bill guffaws and Eve soaks up the validation; her reality may be sad, but at least she can tell a decent joke about it.

“That’s all in the past,” he tells her. “What’s stopped you since?”

Eve gulps her long black. “I wouldn’t know where to start, alright? We don’t all have your experience.”

“Eve,” says Bill seriously, “every time, every relationship—you start at the beginning.”

*

Eve’s Fashion Week article actually comes in useful when she books in the interview with Kedrin. The PA she speaks to is aware of the story, seeming to have found it charitable enough towards the brand.

“Mrs Polastri,” Kedrin greets her when she joins him in his office.

There’s a fruit platter and a bottle of sparkling water between them as they sit—him in the high-backed seat behind his desk, her in a stackable chair opposite.

“Ms, actually,” she corrects cordially.

“My apologies,” he amends, but doesn’t double-take. Only picks up a couple of blueberries and pops them in his mouth.

Eve looks away while he chews. She sets the recorder on the heavy wooden surface next to her notepad. She doesn’t need to take notes this way, but she finds it useful to _appear_ focused on certain things during interviews.

After she has evidence of his consent to tape, they begin.

“I’d like to start by offering you my sincere condolences, Mr Kedrin, and to thank you for agreeing to speak with me. There are a lot of people out there who feel they knew Kasia, by virtue of her career, and it will mean a lot to them to be able to connect with you, her mentor, at this difficult time.”

“It is good to meet a reporter with the right priorities. There can be a reprehensible lack of empathy in your profession. No offense intended, of course.”

Eve gives him a small, false chuckle. “None taken. The paparazzi rags out there printing blatant fiction reflect badly on us all. It’s why I’d love to delve into your relationship with Kasia a bit more today. Set things straight.”

“Of course. Let’s get to it, then.” Kedrin pulls a grape from the bunch.

“What was your first impression of Kasia, when you met her?”

“She was a very shy girl. Innocent, but also determined. She came from a poor family back in Poland and did not have all the tools, but I could tell she would do whatever it took to build a better life for herself.”

“And what did it take?” Eve asks, still genial.

“Commitment,” Kedrin says. “The resilience to come back from rejection and failure. The forbearance to network with sometimes difficult people is paramount, I’m afraid, as it is in so many industries. But there is also talent—people underestimate the skill involved in modelling, but it is an art. A certain malleability, too; you have to be willing to let the industry shape you, before you can shape it in return.”

“How did you shape her?”

Kedrin takes another grape. “I taught her the skills, gave her exposure… but more than that, I do credit myself with giving her confidence. She did not feel that she was beautiful, even though she was. She used to say that I showed her her own beauty.”

“It sounds like you were very close.”

Kedrin sits back. He lifts his left shin to rest, horizontal, over his right knee.

“Her work kept her busy; she did not have much time for friends, boyfriends. As her mentor I was the closest person to her.”

“How many girls like Kasia have you mentored?”

“Two dozen, perhaps, over the years. Not all were as successful or as dear to me as she was, although most have gone on to great things: you may be aware of Zizi Varga’s modelling agency, or Annika Stepanova’s leading publicity firm, for instance.”

Stepanova, Eve’s come across in her research. She’s vocal about her high-profile connections, Kedrin included, but that’s hardly surprising given that her company’s primary product is leveraging social media influence.

Eve diverts: “Do you consider yourself a feminist, Mr Kedrin?”

Kedrin’s lips twitch. “I love women,” he replies. “I run a brand that is very focused on nurturing female talent and helping my girls succeed in their dream industry. I design clothes predominantly for women, to make them feel beautiful and empowered. Call that what you want; I like to think people should be judged on actions, not labels.”

“Isn’t eschewing labels kind of ironic for a fashion designer?” she jokes, and he laughs along.

“Seriously, though: you never confirmed your relationship—never _labelled_ it, so to speak—but my readers would truly love to get a sense of how you and Miss Molkovska first ended up romantically involved. Can we get a glimpse at that story, Mr Kedrin? For the fans?”

Kedrin’s hand, halfway to the fruit platter, pauses and retreats into his lap.

*

It turns out that Zizi Varga is easier to track down than Annika Stepanova. She makes herself quite available to talk to Eve, when she hears there’s a story about Kedrin being told.

“She’s either going to dish on him or blow smoke up his arse,” predicts Elena. “Either way, there’s something she wants to say if she’s meeting you this afternoon on no notice.”

“Maybe she’s just jumping aboard the Kasia story while it’s hot,” Eve shrugs.

Elena dives into her phone for a minute. “Weird, then, that there have been no mentions of Kedrin or Kasia on her social media. She’s sitting on something juicy, I can _feel_ it.”

“Or she’s not sitting on anything, and I’m about to waste my afternoon.”

“You don’t believe that,” Elena bats her protests away.

Eve takes a breath, grabbing her notebook and handbag. “No,” she admits. “I don’t.”

_James & Varga _have small, indie-chic offices decorated with poster-sized editorial photos framed against raw brick, and variegated Pothos draped over stacks of hardcover design books. Eve’s looking at a blown-up Vogue Ukraine cover picturing a cold-looking model in a half-drenched couture gown when an identical woman walks into the reception lounge. The model, who looks both warmer and older in person, offers a hand.

“Ms Polastri,” she greets Eve. “I’m Nina, Ms Varga’s EA. Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee?”

“No, thank you,” Eve replies, and immediately starts craving caffeine.

“Cool. She’s just through here, if you’ll follow me.”

The hallway Nina leads her down is lined with signed photographs and magazine pages in the style of nostalgic Italian restaurants. Tall, arched windows let light filter in, supplemented by naked bulbs strung from the high ceiling.

Varga’s office door is open. She rises to meet Eve with a handshake that’s decidedly firmer than Nina’s. She’s wearing heels, which is just unfair given she’d be six feet in just socks. Her voice is deep. Accented, not unlike Oksana’s. Her eyes are different, though, as she regards Eve; more reluctant, somehow, at the same time as being more accessible.

“Thanks, Nina,” she nods. “You should leave for the day; it’s been a long one.”

Nina frowns. “Are you sure? I can stay for—”

A minute shake of Varga’s head cuts her off.

“Alright,” she says instead. “See you tomorrow.”

The door closed behind her, Varga addresses Eve. “So, Ms Polastri. What do you want to hear about Victor?”

Eve has her notebook out, but can’t find her pen in the bottom of her bag. Shit. “Um,” she says, digging around awkwardly, “I’m trying to confirm the nature of his relationship with Kasia Molkovska.”

Varga scoffs, though Eve doesn’t get the impression it’s aimed at her. She removes a heavy fountain pen from the handmade ceramic stationery holder on her desk and offers it to Eve.

“I only met the girl a few times, personally—Victor brought me over seventeen years ago, and she was a much newer import. I remember she seemed… hollow. Very much in the thrall of her drug addiction, and her addiction to _him_.”

“So they were in a sexual relationship?”

Varga tilts her head. “Is a butcher in a relationship with his animals?” she asks. “Perhaps she believed he loved her, I don’t know. For myself and the girls I knew, it was a way out of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, or wherever else he found us. A way that did not seem worth it once he had us to use and distribute as he saw fit.”

The set of her mouth is bitter.

“Are you saying Kedrin- _trafficked_ you, Kasia, and other women?”

“Girls,” Varga corrects, “and yes; I reported as much several years ago, actually, but strangely enough nothing was done. It was exactly as he said it would be if we tried to escape; nobody would listen. Only Oksana ever really got away from Victor—and her career disappeared just as suddenly as he promised it would, without him. At least for a while.”

Eve abandons all pretence of taking notes and fires every question as it comes to her mind.

“Who did you report to, back then? And—uh, do you want me to be telling this story? Because I will, if there isn’t some other way you want to do it. If you want to go public at all. Are you still in contact with this Oksana?”

“I reported it to the police, of course,” Varga says.

She sounds a little unimpressed with Eve’s failure to keep up, but with the revelations coming in this hard Eve will be the first to admit her skull is overflowing.

“And I would not have invited a journalist into my office for this conversation if I did not want everyone to know what Victor really is. As for Oksana… we do not talk. You would have a better line to her than me. Your paper is one of the Twelve, right? It’s Oksana Astankova. God knows how, but she just took over Villanelle.”

Fuck overflowing, Eve thinks. Her mind’s just blown itself across the rustic brick wall.


	10. Wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with worms

“What about this one?”

Eve pulls the change room curtain halfway aside.

Bill gives her the once-over. “You know,” he says, “you want a lot of feedback for someone who grabbed me and said ‘we’re going somewhere and you’re not going to say a word about it’.”

Eve glares. Folds her arms across her breasts where they surge upwards out of the padded dark blue demi-cups.

“You look gorgeous, of course,” he adds kindly. “I still think you should try it in the lemon, though.”

“You can just say _yellow,_ ” Eve laughs. “I’m not some interior designer trying to decide between salmon and seafoam.”

“I should hope not, if you think those two are comparable.”

Even turns to look at herself in the full-length mirror. The bra has her closer to achieving actual cleavage than she’s been since a short-lived experiment with bra-stuffing in high school. The largely transparent mini corset thing—waspie, according to the tag—isn’t unpleasantly tight around her waist, and the dangling suspender ribbons are removable. Eve may be making an effort, stepping outside her comfort zone, but she is not about to fuck around with old-fashioned stockings.

The briefs that match the set are satiny with minimal lace detailing. Elastic and wire boning hug her tightly in places ordinary cotton underwear doesn’t, pressing their way into memories of the last time Eve bothered to try and dress up for bedroom purposes. It’s been a _while_.

She looks good, but…

“It just looks like I’m trying too hard.”

“Eve,” says Bill in his serious voice, “lingerie is _never_ an effortless look. That’s the appeal of it, in my view: it’s a statement. Of effort, of intent—and isn’t that what you want?”

Eve watches herself; takes a deep breath, pulls herself up tall and then slumps as she sighs it out.

“I guess.”

She can hear Bill’s eyeroll. “That’s the spirit,” he says. The sarcasm’s scalding. “Hold on a minute.”

She waits. She checks her phone. Just Elena, cluing in to the fact that Eve and Bill have both taken a long lunch.

Impulsively, she opens her camera. Maybe if she can capture herself from a good angle, it’ll really sell her on the expensive knickers. The lighting is weird, but not unflattering; if she tilts her body just so, defining shadows are cast between her tits and along the centre line of her abs. Eve lets her hair fall in her face a bit, holding the phone such that it obscures the rest. She swivels her hips and perches one leg forward on tip-toe so the swell of her arse is visible.

Part of her still feels like an idiot—but the rest processes the composition of the photograph more objectively: she looks hot. She _is_ hot. And frankly, who on earth decided she was supposed to go about her life acting like she didn’t know it?

**Free tonight?** she texts Oksana. Meeting her own eyes in the mirror for a second, she attaches the picture and sends, then slips the phone back into her handbag. Something tells her she won’t need to read the reply to know the answer.

“Are you decent, Eve?” Bill’s voice is rendered fuzzy by the drawn curtain.

“Hardly,” she answers, and pulls it aside anyway. “What’s this finishing touch you’ve—oh, that’s not bad.”

The robe is rich satin in a matching blue. It’s simple and graceful. Not lacy or transparent, but cut to give a tantalisingly deep neckline and flow out from the cinched waist with fluid ease.

“No,” Bill agrees, pleased with his work. “It’s not bad at all.”

*

Eve’s house is not very _Eve_ , thinks Villanelle as she wipes her boots on the doormat and waits. She listens amusedly to the way Eve’s footsteps run in several directions before she’s ready to let her guest in. Villanelle is only five minutes early.

“I am very upset with you, you know,” she says seriously, as the door’s pulled back.

Eve is wearing a lovely (albeit not particularly expensive) satin robe, but a hint of lace at the collar betrays what’s underneath. Villanelle pretends not to notice or care. She watches Eve’s confusion mature through its phases of surprise, worry, and then stubborn indignance.

“Come in,” Eve bids her with a frown. Her eyes still run appreciatively up and down Villanelle’s body, taking in the casual outfit she’s chosen. It will be on the floor soon, anyway. “Shoes off, please.”

“Don’t you want to know _why_ I am upset?” she asks, sweeping across the threshold and doing as she’s asked, making sure she’s bending over to best advantage as she unties her laces.

Eve teased when she sent her that photograph earlier—the one Villanelle’s opened up and glanced at every ten minutes or so in the intervening hours—and now it’s Villanelle’s turn to taunt her back. If she can just get a reaction.

Eve only cocks a brow. “I figure you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

Villanelle follows her host into the residence’s homely kitchen, helping herself to a seat at the dining table and admiring the stretch of Eve’s muscular calves as she tip-toes to reach the long-stemmed glasses.

It occurs to her that this was not built to be a single-person household.

“Who else lives here?”

Eve’s shoulders rise, tense. “No one,” she lies.

Villanelle stands again, beginning a casual perusal of the everyday items at hand. “You are into vermiculture, then?” she asks, quizzical.

“Into _what_?”

“Vermiculture. Worm farming.” She hooks a finger behind the overhang of the hardcover spine of a book on the subject, which is squeezed in at the end of a messy bookshelf. A press from her fingertip and it tilts over and out, leaving the adjacent book to fold into the empty space. She waves the title in the air for Eve to see.

“Uh, no,” Eve says, like she wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with worms.

Dumping the book on top of the shelf she’d taken it from, Villanelle stalks towards Eve, who now offers her an over-full glass of Malbec.

“So whose is it?” Whispering conspiratorially: “Are we having an _affair_ , Eve?”

Eve chugs her wine as angrily as Villanelle has ever seen it done. Head thrown back, throat bobbing.

“I’m separated,” she answers, once she can bring herself to detach from the glass. “Officially divorced any day now. Haven’t had time to sell the house yet… it’s all a slower process than you imagine when you’re in the process of destroying your marriage.”

“I see.” Villanelle sips her own drink. That explains why the house does not feel like an extension of the Eve she knows; it isn’t. It’s the tomb of Eve’s dead relationship with someone who cared about worms. Perhaps that is why Eve seems less at ease here than the places they’ve previously met. Villanelle wonders whether Eve regrets inviting her into a space that’s so… complicated.

Eve sits—in the chair Villanelle had previously taken at the table. Villanelle pulls up the opposite chair and sticks her feet out to tap against Eve’s shins.

“Why are you upset?” Eve asks at last.

“You went shopping,” answers Villanelle. “ _Without_ me. I love shopping. I am extremely good at it!”

“Ha,” Eve laughs. “Wait, you’re not serious—what, am I meant to call you every time I need eggs or toilet paper?”

“Oh Eve,” she sighs, “you are such a little shit… Now are you at least going to take your robe off and show me what you bought?”

“I could be persuaded,” Eve decides, leaning into her designation as a little shit. She looks so intently at Villanelle that the mausoleum around them loses focus. “ _If_ you’ll answer a few questions first.”


	11. Break the skin

Not even Oksana’s mouth on Eve’s neck is distraction enough.

“You used to work with Zizi Varga, right?” Eve asks.

“Who?” Villanelle mumbles. The tip of her nose trails up to nudge at Eve’s ear.

“An ex-colleague of yours, so she says. She also claims that she and others were trafficked by Victor Kedrin.”

“Well she sounds boring,” Oksana complains. “I do not care about these people, Eve, and I definitely do not want to talk about them right now. It would ruin the mood.”

Eve leans away—but not before Oksana can lick insolently across her ear with the wet flat of her tongue. She pulls up her robe where it’s fallen off her shoulder, wipes her ear with the back of her hand and crosses her arms.

“I’m serious, okay? I’m looking for answers that I think you might be able to give me. I want to talk about this before we, y’know,” she untucks one hand to gesture between them.

Oksana surveys her, expression flattening. Neutral. She says: “What about what I want? I have already given you my magazine’s best source—so why don’t you save your journalist questions for her and let me kiss you?” There’s a note of stiff finality in the words that Eve thinks might snap rather than bend. It feels like a finding in itself—and it also reminds her that this is a woman well-equipped to intimidate if she wishes.

“Okay,” she relents. “I’ll ask V first.”

Villanelle’s smile is back as though it never left. “Good,” she says happily. “Now, do you want me to fuck you over the kitchen bench, or is there a bed you prefer?”

“Bench,” Eve answers keenly, swiping at a wooden cutting board and used knife with the side of her arm until they clatter into the sink. “And don’t hold back.”

It’s not an invitation Villanelle can refuse.

*

**What happened between Oksana and Victor Kedrin?**

Eve’s been checking all morning, but there’s been no response from V. Maybe it’s a time zone thing? Or maybe Oksana’s source is in the middle of their top-secret work day doing surveillance or hacking or whatever—and by god, sometimes Eve wishes she could be the one stealing state secrets.

She’s about to embark on an early lunch when the door to Carolyn’s office opens and voices catch her attention.

“Thank you, Konstantin,” Carolyn says genially. Eve peers around the row of desks to see her shaking hands with a stout, bearded man—

—beside whom is Oksana.

“I will do what I can,” he answers with a self-deprecating shrug. “But you know how the young ones are.”

“Pssh,” says Oksana. “Konstantin is just being funny, Carolyn. He is always cracking his terrible jokes. _I_ will take care of everything myself. It is already in motion.”

“See to it that you do,” Carolyn nods. “I’ll see you both later.”

Konstantin smiles, slipping his hands in the pockets of his light jacket. “Soon, I hope.”

Oksana grabs him by the elbow and wheels him away like he’s some kind of embarrassing parent. To Eve’s mild relief, their route doesn’t bring them towards her.

She slips her fingers under the collar of her shirt, fingers finding the tender ring of bruised spots where Oksana honest-to-god _bit_ her last night. Applying a little pressure earns her a twinge of pain that’s not at all unpleasant. It’s an action she’s been repeating to the point of conspicuousness.

Frankly, she’s not sure what she’d say to Oksana if she had to talk to her right now. _Please_ , she might beg right here in the middle of the office, _I want you to hold me down and fuck me like that again, already. Like you could easily break the skin. Like you might, if I put a foot wrong._

It was, Eve can say without reservation, the most comprehensive fucking she’s ever received. She doubts she’d even have made it to work today if Bill hadn’t decided to pick her up.

“Eve.”

Eve jolts out of her thoughts at the sound of Carolyn’s voice. Calling her. The new boss is looking down the corridor, beckoning her towards her office. Eve whips her hand out from underneath her shirt as surreptitiously as possible and makes her way over.

Carolyn’s office feels oddly vacant. There are personal touches—objects placed here and there: a book, a vase, a paperweight, a tennis racquet—but they feel almost like they’re personal to someone else. Perhaps someone who’s only hypothetical. Like a staged bedroom in IKEA.

Carolyn shuts the door behind them.

“So Eve,” she asks, moving around her desk to sit. “Please have a seat, and tell me why you haven’t published anything in the last week.”

Eve’s stomach twists. “I’ve been following a few leads,” she says, “but it takes time. I’m cultivating a new source who seems to have a lot of interesting suggestions.”

“Such as?”

“I- well, for instance—”

Eve’s phone chooses this moment to buzz so hard it slides out of the pocket of her slacks. It lands, face up, and she can see the caller name—K, and a computer emoji.

“Answer it,” Carolyn suggests mildly. Eve can’t quite tell whether she’s being sarcastic or not, but she does know that if Kenny’s calling her instead of texting then he’s got something she’ll want to hear.

“Hi—” she answers, but he’s already talking a million miles an hour.

“Carla de Mann was poisoned. Lab’s just confirmed it—we suspect VX, the nerve agent. Odourless, fast-working especially if the victim inhales it, which makes sense given Carla’s asthma… Eve, I need to know who told you about this. Nobody could have had that information unless—well, I just need to know. Please.”

“Oh my god, that’s amazing!”

“Are you listening—”

“Yes, I heard you! Thank you—I have a story to post before anyone else gets their hands on it! Bye!”

Carolyn watches with interest. Eve puts her phone back in her pocket and says, somewhat more composed: “My source tipped me off that there was foul play in the recent death of Carla de Mann. I’ve pre-written a thousand words about it, but I’ve been waiting for some more solid confirming evidence.”

“Which I take it you’ve just received.” Carolyn tilts her head.

Eve’s phone rings again. She ignores it. Carolyn, too, exhibits none of her earlier concern for phone-answering.

“Yes.”

“Well then, what are you still doing in here? Go and break your story.”

Eve switches her phone to silent while she adds finishing touches to the story. Venomous Agent X, a more potent nerve agent than sarin. Causes uncontrollable muscle contractions, leading to asphyxiation. Manmade. Useful for chemical warfare and no other purpose. Recently involved in the assassination of Kim Jong-nam.

Eventually Kenny stops calling her. She sees his text come in but doesn’t open it. _Call me back as soon as you can,_ it’ll say. _This is deadly serious._ He’ll be mad, yes, but he’ll get over it eventually. Elena’s always helpful in that regard.

The second message is a surprise, though. Kenny’s _it’s very rude the way you’re ignoring me_ nudges are always the last word until she decides to call him back.

Quickly forwarding the unpublished article to Carolyn for final approval, Eve unlocks the phone. The message is not, in fact, from Kenny:

**Kedrin bit off more than he could chew** , it says.


End file.
